The present disclosure is related to the field of fetal monitoring. More specifically, the present disclosure is related to a device and method for fetal monitoring.
Fetal monitors often combine multiple technologies in order to acquire physiological parameters of the fetus in which a highly trained clinician such as a nurse or doctor would find interesting in evaluating the health of the fetus. These technologies and parameters include Doppler ultrasound to detect fetal heart rate and fetal motion detection, tocodynamometry to detect uterine activity, pulse oximetry to detect maternal heart rate and vibro-acoustic stimulation to “wake up” the fetus.
While each of these parameters are considered useful to the trained clinician, the combination of these technologies currently used to acquire these parameters present significant challenges. Doppler ultrasound is limited in ability to detect short term variability in fetal heart rate, which can be an indicator of fetal stress. Doppler ultrasound is further susceptible to frequent signal loss due to maternal/fetal movements which causes gaps in the FHR tracings. Toco and Doppler are also inconvenient as they are limited in ability to monitor obese patients. Furthermore, the use of these complex technologies require highly trained clinicians in order to properly position and prepare the patient's skin for each of these devices to obtain meaningful physiological measurements, as well as to interpret the readings from these physiological measurements.